[clue-talk] little survey

[Bruce Ediger]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, dennisjperkins at comcast.net wrote:

> I have a little informal survey about the Linux preferences of CLUE members.

When do we get to see a summary?  I've watched the answer for "do you get to
use linux at work" and I'm quite jealous, because my at-work desktop runs
Windows XP.

Which brings me to my question/observation.  If you have to use Windows XP,
which we'll just say is "painful, for a lot of reasons" to avoid steams
of blasphemous invective, do you find it slower than your linux experience?

The contrast is becoming almost grotesque for me.  I have an elderly,
700 MHz Pentium 3 machine in my 1st floor office, and a 1.3 GHz AMD
Athlong server in the basement, both running Slackware 12.0.  The 700 MHz
Pentium 3, with 386 Mb of PC133 memory, just FLYS compared with a far newer,
far faster Compaq "EVO" on my work desktop. I keep at least 10 tabs open
in Firefox, and I can swith between tabs almost instantly on Slackware.
IE7 on XP: creating a new tab takes 10+ seconds, switching tabs seems to take
longer.  Opening an xterm on Slackware takes 2 seconds, opening a "cmd" window
on XP takes 10 seconds.  Changing focus on Slackware is instaneous, when
IE7 or "Outlook" or "Toad" or "Word" get focus, they take 5 to 10 seconds to
recognize this fact.

What in the sam scratch is going on here?  Why can an old, under-resourced
Linux box beat a newer Windows box, and not just by a fraction, but by
an order of magnitude for most things?  The so-called "Process Monitor"
doesn't show CPU bound or paging bound characteristics, but I have no faith
in that, as the "Anti" Virus companies have seemingly adopted rootkit
techniques to keep us from seeing how much CPU/disk/memory they eat.